The Best Sentence I Read This Week

“The dark days of deals are over. Financial institutions will have to decide if they want to be banks or if they want to engage in the risky financial trading that caused the collapse of firms like AIG.”

It’s probably fair to say that the amount of lobbying dollars spent by the Wall Street banks in DC is directly correlated to the size of their profit margins under threat. So this is going to be one heckua fight. But let’s be clear – the debate over derivatives you’ll be hearing about in the weeks ahead has nothing to do with economic freedom, limiting customers’ flexibility, or any other rhetoric. Banks don’t want any transparency into derivatives because the margins are so large. Sunlight means less profit – full stop. And while there’s no bigger fan of profit than me, if it comes at the expense of pulling the wool over your customers’ eyes, then it’s fair to question how sustainable those profits really are.

Politics aside, I think the huge pushback the Wall Street banks are mounting to what really should be a no-brainer part of reform underscores one key insight for investors: these banks don’t have sustainable moats.

Whatever economies of scale they might have are dwarfed by the complexity of their businesses, and that scale is certainly not evident in their internal returns. While there are plenty of sharp folks who work for the big banks, from a business owner’s perspective, that’s kind of like seeing your competitive advantage walk out the door every night.

So a point that I think gets lost in all the rhetoric these days is that these banks are lousy businesses. I would have thought that obvious to anyone alive in 2008, yet somehow it is not. Wall Street banks don’t represent the best of American companies, nor do they have any interest in truly free markets. I suppose you might respect their power and their unique political connections, but they shouldn’t get any credit at all for building enduring businesses. And shouldn’t that be at least a little relevant here?

When it comes to financial reform, Wall Street banks certainly don’t deserve a seat at the negotiating table because they’ve earned it. They bought it. Here’s to hoping we see that change.

Update: Um, never mind. This is now the most amazing sentence I’ve read this week:

And from a political strategy perspective, this announcement is arguably brilliant in terms of timing. Not only has Goldman’s seat at the reform table imploded, but the other big banks just saw the height of their chairs drop by about a foot.

Well-played, Forces of Good. Now, break up the banks, and I’ll quit badmouthing you for at least a week.